The Responsibility Project^®. Exploring what it means to do the right thing

What do Tweeting, Facebooking and texting have to do with diplomacy? More than you’d think, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article that details the efforts of two State Department employees, Alec Ross and Jared Cohen, in helping push communication from “the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations” to amplified, fast-moving communication that encourages cyber-activism and tech-based policy solutions.

The “shift in form and in strategy,” as writer Jesse Lichtenstein calls it, can be referred to as “21st century statecraft.” The State Department’s investment in this hybrid of social-networking and foreign-policy has resulted in some groundbreaking changes in the way government and private citizens respond to crisis, for instance. After Ross and Cohen helped orchestrate a meeting between 10 leading figures of the tech and social media worlds and senior State Department staffers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited attendees to use her “as an app.” A few days later, when the Haiti earthquake struck, one attendee— James Eberhard of Mobile Accord —did just that, working with the State Department to set up the Text Haiti 90999 program, which raised more than $40 million for the Red Cross in $10 donations.

And while using things like social media and cell phones to accomplish heretofore difficult tasks like monitoring voting irregularities in Sierra Leone and Montenegro, tech-based diplomacy “may usher in as many diplomatic catastrophes as breakthroughs,” according to its critics. One risk, according to the article, is that countries may conflate vehicles with states. The story quotes Carlos Pascual, the US ambassador to Mexico: “…if and when in a particular country – whether that’s China or Iran or Cuba or North Korea – there’s a perception that Twitter or Facebook is a tool of the US government. That becomes dangerous for the company, and it becomes dangerous for people who are using that tool,” although he notes it’s still better to allow the tool to exist.

Ross and Cohen, in the story, take the line that, like anything, “All of these tools can be utilized by individuals for… negative purposes…but that technology isn’t going anywhere. So we can fear we can’t control it and ignore the space, or we can recognize we can’t control it, but we can influence it.”

What do you think? Is it responsible for the government to enter what the Times calls “the age of Twittering bureaucrats?” Or should diplomacy be kept behind closed doors?